Capital IQ Pro vs Orbis Pricing: Filed Rate Cards 2026

Capital IQ Pro and Moody's Orbis are the only two enterprise company-data platforms that have ever filed a real, banded price list. Both did it on the UK G-Cloud 14 framework, where selling to public bodies obliges a supplier to publish. Read side by side, Orbis costs roughly 3.6 to 5.9 times more per seat than Capital IQ Pro at every comparable band: five seats is GBP 265,000 on Orbis against GBP 45,000 on Capital IQ Pro, and a hundred seats is GBP 900,000 against GBP 250,000. They also price add-ons in opposite directions, with S&P charging 75% of base for API access and Moody's charging 20%. Every figure below is read directly from the filed pricing documents, retrieved August 2026. Educational only, not procurement or financial advice.

Capital IQ Pro vs Orbis pricing at a glance

The comparison below puts each vendor's filed band next to the other's at matching seat counts. Where the two cards use different band boundaries, the nearest comparable band is used and named.

Two caveats before anyone quotes those numbers at a salesperson. The Capital IQ Pro card is dated 3 December 2025 and is marked "exclusively for UK public sector clients only" with a time limited special discount noted as running to 31 December 2025. The Orbis card is dated April 2024 and carries no such marking. So this is not a perfectly like for like comparison, and the Capital IQ Pro side may well be the friendlier of the two prices. The gap is wide enough that it survives the caveat, but the caveat is real.

The second caveat is that these are different products doing different jobs, which is most of why the prices differ. More on that below, because it is the part that actually decides which one you should be buying.

Why is Orbis so much more expensive than Capital IQ Pro?

Coverage breadth, mostly. Orbis is built on more than 200 national company registries and carries records on hundreds of millions of companies worldwide, the overwhelming majority of them private and most of them small. That data has to be sourced, translated, normalized into a comparable financial template and kept current, registry by registry, country by country. Nobody else has assembled it at that scale, and the price reflects a near monopoly on non-US private company financials.

Capital IQ Pro is a different shape. Its depth is in public companies, transaction comparables, estimates, screening and the SNL banking and insurance franchise, with private company coverage that is strong in the United States and thinner elsewhere. If your work is public market analysis, comps and screening, Capital IQ Pro is both cheaper and better suited. If you need audited financials for a mid-sized manufacturer in Poland or a beneficial ownership chain through three jurisdictions, Capital IQ Pro will not get you there at any price and Orbis will.

That is the honest version of the comparison. The seat price gap is not a discount waiting to be negotiated, it is two different datasets. The mistake worth avoiding is paying the Orbis premium for work that never leaves the US public markets, which is more common than it sounds because Orbis often arrives bundled into a compliance or credit decision that nobody revisits.

How much does the API cost on each platform?

This is where the two vendors diverge most sharply, and it is the single most useful number in either document if you plan to pull data programmatically.

S&P charges nearly four times the percentage Moody's does. In absolute pounds, though, the picture flips at smaller sizes: because the S&P base is so much lower, adding API to a twenty seat Capital IQ Pro contract costs GBP 64,500 against GBP 92,000 for the same addition on Orbis. By a hundred seats the two absolute figures have nearly converged. If you are comparing percentage uplifts in a spreadsheet without multiplying them out against each base, you will reach the wrong conclusion about which vendor is punishing you for API access.

The 25% API-only option on the S&P side has no Orbis equivalent in the filed documents and deserves attention on its own. It buys programmatic delivery with no desktop seats at all, at a quarter of the desktop base. For a team that wants data flowing into its own models rather than analysts clicking around a terminal, that is a materially different purchase from the one most vendors lead with, and S&P applies the same 75% and 25% pair across its other filed cards too, including Credit Analytics and ESG Desktop, so it reads as company policy rather than a Capital IQ quirk.

Modules and add-ons: where the rest of the money goes

Moody's files a complete module list priced as a percentage of the Orbis base, which is unusually transparent and lets you model a real configuration.

Moody's own worked example on the card is worth reproducing because it shows how fast this compounds: four named users at GBP 244,000, plus DEI at 5% (GBP 12,200), plus ESG score predictor at 10% (GBP 24,400), plus beneficial ownership at 15% (GBP 36,600), comes to GBP 317,200 plus VAT. Three modules added 30% to the bill.

Because every module is a percentage of base, its cost rises every time you add a seat, whether or not anybody is using it. A module bought at four users costs two and a half times as much at twenty users for exactly the same access. Auditing what your team actually opens is worth more than arguing about the base rate, and it is the one lever that does not cost anyone their login.

One module worth singling out: if the reason ESG is on your shortlist is your own corporate reporting rather than screening counterparties, neither of these is the right purchase. Portfolio and counterparty ESG scores answer a different question from your own Scope 1, 2 and 3 footprint, and dedicated carbon accounting software handles the latter for a tiny fraction of a data platform module. Buying an ESG uplift on a six figure company database to produce an emissions disclosure is a common and expensive mismatch.

Both rate cards have a band where extra seats cost more, not less

Volume pricing is supposed to get cheaper per unit as you scale. Both filed cards break that rule in exactly one place, and neither vendor flags it.

On Capital IQ Pro, moving from the 10 user band to the 20 user band costs GBP 23,000 for ten additional seats, about GBP 2,300 each. Moving from 20 to 35 costs GBP 59,000 for fifteen seats, about GBP 3,933 each. The marginal seat gets 71% more expensive on the way up. That makes the 20 user band the value point on the whole curve and makes crossing out of it the single dearest move available.

On Orbis, going from 10 to 15 named users costs GBP 45,000 for five seats, GBP 9,000 each. Going from 15 to 20 costs GBP 55,000 for five, GBP 11,000 each. Same pattern, smaller magnitude, same practical consequence.

The takeaway is the same on both platforms. Count your genuine named users before the renewal conversation rather than rounding up for comfort, because on both of these cards there is a point where one more seat drags you into a band that costs far more than the seat is worth. Trimming two dormant logins can be worth more than any discount you were going to ask for.

What do these platforms cost in US dollars?

Both cards are filed in pounds. Converting at 1.3656 dollars to the pound, which is our own arithmetic and not a vendor figure, gives a rough sense of scale for a US buyer.

US federal contract awards, which are public and audited, land in the same territory and are worth checking against. S&P Global Market Intelligence awards run from roughly $459,000 to $6.9 million a year, with the DOJ paying $515,081 a year for Capital IQ financial data access. On the Moody's side the DOE bought four Orbis licenses for about $293,000 a year, against a filed four user band of GBP 244,000 base. Those two numbers agree closely enough to give the filed card real credibility as a description of what buyers actually pay.

What renewal escalators should I expect?

This is the number that decides your five year cost and almost nobody negotiates it. The public federal award record shows exact contractual escalators on the Moody's side: 8.00% a year on Orbis, 5.00% on CreditEdge Plus in two consecutive years, and 4.50% on REIS. Comparable figures computed from contiguous LSEG awards come out around 4.6% to 5.0%.

An 8% annual uplift compounds to roughly 47% over five years. A 3% cap compounds to about 16%. On a GBP 460,000 Orbis contract the difference between those two paths is well over GBP 500,000 across the term, which dwarfs any first year discount you are likely to win. Get the escalator capped in writing and treat the headline rate as the secondary negotiation.

Timing helps too. Moody's states in its 2025 annual report that a large portion of its subscription services are invoiced in November, December and January, which means renewal conversations open around September. Arriving with usage data before that window is a materially stronger position than responding to a quote in December.

Which should I buy, Capital IQ Pro or Orbis?

That last row is worth sitting with, because it is the row most procurement processes never consider. A great deal of what gets done on a GBP 265,000 contract is one analyst reading filings and writing up a view. If that is the actual job, the data platform is carrying a lot of cost for capability nobody in the room is using. Our own AI stock research tool covers that specific workflow at $29 to $249 a month: enter a ticker and it assembles the thesis, the bull case, the bear case, key metrics with peer context, comparables and labeled risk flags. It carries no real-time data, no private company registry coverage and no redistribution rights, so it complements a data contract rather than replacing one, and it is informational research only rather than investment advice.

Where these numbers come from

Both rate cards are public documents filed by the vendors themselves on the UK Digital Marketplace under G-Cloud 14. S&P Global Market Intelligence LLC has filed thirteen services there, every one with a pricing document, and we have read all thirteen: the full breakdown is on our S&P Global Market Intelligence pricing page. Moody's filed the Orbis card in April 2024. Neither company publishes a US price list, which is why the estimates circulating elsewhere are reseller figures and procurement medians rather than rate cards.

For the wider picture, our Capital IQ cost guide covers the legacy platform and the US reported figures, the Moody's Analytics cost guide covers CreditView, CreditEdge, REIS and the federal award record in detail, and financial data providers compared puts all nine major vendors and what US agencies actually paid in a single table. If you are weighing Capital IQ against cheaper options, the Capital IQ alternatives page lists what each one replaces and what it does not.

Last updated August 2026. Figures read directly from the filed pricing documents on the day of writing. Rate cards get revised, so check the current filing before you build a budget on any single number here.